The University of Toronto's Culinary Collections

Harley J. Spiller, Robert Bon Lee, Brazilian Menu Collections, Culinary Cookbooks, and the Culinary Ephemera Collections

University of Toronto’s Scarborough (UTSC) holds various collections such as the Harley J. Spiller Menus Collection within their archives (also found here through the Digital Scholarship Unit), as well as the Culinary Cookbooks Collection within their library. Lesser known archival collections at the UTSC are the Robert Bon Lee Menu and Brazilian Menu fonds (finding aids available through links). Away from UTSC, the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, which is located on the St. George campus holds a Culinary Ephemera Collection.

The Harley J. Spiller Menus Collection was acquired by the University of Toronto in 2014— becoming the host of the world’s largest (primarily) Chinese menu collection. According to the Toronto Star, “the collection was transported in more than 50 boxes weighing more than 500 kilograms altogether. Three-quarters of that was the Chinese menus alone.” This collection was purchased from American-based collector, Harley Spiller himself— by the university for approximately $40,000. This collection was especially deemed as valuable resource for food scholars, especially at UTSC’s Culinary Research Centre.

In 2015, the Culinary Cookbooks Collection that consists of over 100 books was started by Whitney Kemble, who is the Liaison Librarian for Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough Library.

“I thought that they could add value, not just to the food studies students, but to the general student population, faculty and staff – everyone’s got to eat,” she says.

The maintaining of the cookbooks collection is an ongoing process, as it is being further developed by Kemble in order to represent more local and international cuisines that people can check out; to experience more foods through embodied learning.

The Robert Bon Lee Menu Collection contains 65 menus from 1949-1983, primarily representing Chinese and Polynesian cuisines from the Toronto area, with the exception of a few menus from Quebec and the United States. The creator, Robert Bon Lee (b. 1939 - 2020) was a second-generation Chinese-Canadian who took on an interest in Chinese cuisine and formed a close relationship with various Chinese restaurateurs in the Toronto area. Hence, this collection provides insight on Lee’s archival memories of the food he ate and shared while providing researchers with insight on the histories of these restaurants.

The Brazilian Menu Collection was given to the director of the Culinary Research Centre, Daniel Bender. There is little known about the fonds of the collection, other than the creator being Matthew Freeman (n.d.). This collection was inferred to consist of various regional Brazilian menus from 1952?-197-?, as there are restaurant menus that are in the Portuguese language.

Lastly, the Fisher Rare Book Library holds over 750 manuscript collections of a wide variety of subjects, including Culinary Ephemera, which further consists of over 40 cookbooks from England, Canada, Ireland, Germany, and Italy. Another notable fond within this collection would be the Mary Williamson menus (finding aid available through link), dated 1860-2006.

Mary F. Williamson (b. 1933) is a currently retired Fine Arts bibliographer and adjunct professor at York University, further known as a collector of cookbooks and a culinary historian (Library and Archives, n.d). Williamson furthermore published and edited culinary writing such as Mrs. Dalgairns's Kitchen: Rediscovering “The Practice of Cookery” (2021), which explores Canada’s typical nineteenth century kitchen through biographing the diverse lens of Catherine Emily Callbeck Dalgairns. While the uncatalogued menu collection does not explicitly describe Mary F. Williamson’s culinary research background, the content of the Williamson fonds suggests that she is evidently interested in tasting restaurant cuisines from across Canada, predominantly from Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal.